After watching members of Congress behave more like trained seals than as representatives of a sovereign nation, hardliners in Netanyahu's Likud might well believe that there are no outrages against the Palestinians that the U.S. government won't tolerate.
Abhorrent Actions
Many true friends of Israel find the racism that's implicit in these Likud strategies abhorrent, both politically for Israel and as a violation of the honorable Jewish tradition of seeking justice for all, especially for the oppressed.
However, for more than three decades now, especially since the Likud rose to power in the late 1970s, Israel has been shifting away from its egalitarian founding ideals and toward a discriminatory society based on religious claims of special entitlement.
This intolerance has now spilled over from discrimination against Arabs to official separation between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews.
In recent years, Ariel Atias, an ultra-Orthodox Jew from the religious Shas Party and Netanyahu's housing minister, has pushed for segregation in the housing choices of Israel's Arab population and of secular Jews.
"I see [it] as a national duty to prevent the spread of a population [Arabs] that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel," Atias told a conference of the Israel Bar Association. "If we go on like we have until now, we will lose the Galilee. Populations that should not mix are spreading there. I don't think that it is appropriate [for them] to live together."
Atias also spoke favorably of aggressive ultra-Orthodox Jews, known as Haredis, who rough up Arabs who get out of line and harass secular Jews, like those who use machinery on the Sabbath or women who dress in ways considered immodest.
In Atias's vision, Israel would be segregated along inter- and intra-religious lines. "I, as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, don't think that religious Jews should have to live in the same neighborhood as secular couples, so as to avoid unnecessary friction," Atias explained.
Diaspora Myth
On Tuesday, with the repeated standing ovations, the U.S. Congress also embraced Netanyahu's presentation of the semi-mythical Zionist claim that European Jews had a right to reclaim the Holy Land because they were expelled by the Romans two millennia ago.
Academic studies have questioned the historical foundation of the so-called Diaspora, challenging the notion of a mass expulsion of Jews and instead tracing the large Jewish communities of Europe to conversion to Judaism, which in the early centuries of the First Millennium A.D. represented a competing proselytizing religion to Christianity.
For instance, in When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?. Israeli scholar Shlomo Sand challenges the Diaspora narrative as largely a myth, denying that the Jews were exiled en masse from the Holy Land and asserting that many European Jewish populations converted to the faith centuries later.
Dr. Sand, an expert on European history at the University of Tel Aviv, argues that many of today's Israelis who emigrated from Europe to Israel after World War II have little or no genealogical connection to the land.
According to Sand's historical analysis, they are descendants of European converts, principally from the Kingdom of the Khazars in eastern Russia, who embraced Judaism in the Eighth Century, A.D.
The descendants of the Khazars then were driven from their native lands by invasion and conquest and -- through migration -- created the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe, Sand writes. Similarly, he argues that the Jews of Spain came from the conversion of Berber tribes from northern Africa that later migrated into Europe.
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